McCaffrey’s performance catapulted him into the Heisman Trophy conversation.

Will Love’s breakout game do the same?

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The junior is rapidly building a case. He’s averaging 196.8 yards per game and an astounding 10.8 yards per carry. In Bovada’s latest Heisman odds, Love is 33/1, good for a sixth-place tie. Before the UCLA game, he was 66/1.

But like McCaffrey and other Pac-12 stars of past years, Love faces an exposure issue.

Remove its flagship program, USC, from the equation, and the conference has produced one Heisman winner in the past four decades: Oregon’s Marcus Mariota, who entered the 2014 season as a frontrunner and then lived up to the expectations.

For a dark horse candidate from the west coast to win the Heisman, everything must break right — and then some. McCaffrey shattered one of the most hallowed records in the sport (Barry Sanders’ mark for all-purpose yardage) and finished second.

A backup tailback the previous season, he simply had too much ground to cover while covering an amazing amount of ground. (Love was a backup last season, as well, to McCaffrey.)

McCaffrey’s unprecedented performance unfolded largely out of view, with 55 percent of his all-purpose yards coming in games that started at 10 p.m. or later in the Eastern Time Zone.

The start times severely limited his campaign. The Heisman voting regions were designed, it seems, prior to the Louisiana Purchase: Five of the six are east of the Mississippi River, or touch it.

The sixth region — the Far West — stretches from the Dakotas to Hawaii. It’s home to almost a quarter of the U.S. population but just 18 percent of Heisman voters.

McCaffrey won the west handily but was second to Alabama’s Derrick Henry in four regions and finished third, behind Henry and Clemson’s Deshaun Watson, in a fifth.

Worth noting: Love’s show-stopping run against UCLA, a 69-yard dash, occurred at approximately 2 a.m. on the east coast.

McCaffrey also benefitted from a dynamic skill set. He was just as likely to change a game as a receiver or returner as a runner. Love is an elite kick returner but thus far has been used exclusively in the backfield — and not often as a receiver (two receptions).

The other vital component to McCaffrey’s rise in 2015 simply doesn’t exist with Love: There is no Kevin Hogan.

Stanford’s senior quarterback played an incalculable role in McCaffrey’s success with near-perfect execution of the Cardinal offense.

When operating at maximum efficiency, the Cardinal assaults defenses with an endless array of personnel groups, formations, concepts and plays.

Hogan, in his third season as the full-time starter, had attained such mastery of the playbook that he ran the pass protection meetings with the offensive line, while coordinator Mike Bloomgren sat quietly in the back of the room.

That mind-meld with the offense meant Hogan could survey the defense and change from run to pass or pass to run; he could adjust formations; he could realign the protection schemes — all of it with one goal: To get Stanford out of bad plays and into good ones before the snap, so McCaffrey had the best chance to succeed every play.

McCaffrey did plenty on his own, of course. His vision, patience and shiftiness were nonpareil; he would have been an elite player with any quarterback. But Hogan’s operational control of the offense meant McCaffrey usually had numbers (i.e., blockers) on his side or open field in his view.

Love isn’t playing alongside a quarterback with mastery of the playbook. Keller Chryst has started 10 games, Ryan Burns seven and promising freshman K.J. Costello zero.

That inexperience is likely to limit Love’s prospects for success on any given play and Stanford’s prospects for victory on any given week.

The Heisman doesn’t do 7-5, or even 8-4.

Love’s only path to New York City for the ceremony requires individual brilliance for the next two months, team success on a contending level, the derailment of other Pac-12 campaigns — the conference is stacked with elite quarterbacks — and a slew of day games.

Jon Wilner has been covering college sports for decades and is an AP top-25 football and basketball voter as well as a Heisman Trophy voter. He was named Beat Writer of the Year in 2013 by the Football Writers Association of America for his coverage of the Pac-12, won first place for feature writing in 2016 in the Associated Press Sports Editors writing contest and is a five-time APSE honoree.

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